How To Write About Africa calls us to reflect with a more critical lens about Africa and its people. Africa is more than just safaris, jungles, poverty or AIDS. The negative aspect about this is that these images do not represent the people of Africa. I remember, The Gods Must Be Crazy, Shaka Zulu, Blood Diamond, and many more, even in my native language, Spanish, which promoted stereotypes about what Africa represents. For example, a vast majority of Hollywood films about Africa are somehow comical or tragic, constructing negatives images about Africans. The poorest continent without making distinction among countries.
When students some where around the word but Africa need to read articles, books, or news about Africa they refer to Africa as The use of natural resources These constructions about Africa come from various sources- among them from the newspaper, television shows, and so on, but most of them are reinforced through academia and songs. The images of Africa that the world knows are connected with safaris, jungles, animals, music as Binyavanga Wainaina mentions in his essay, but when it is time to talk about people it is connected with poverty, HIV/AIDS, conflicts, wars, or even the uneducated people. Finally this paper will give some suggestion of how to addresses these issues.įirstly, stereotypes and clichés about Africa abound in my mind. In this paper I will address three elements of How To Write About Africa: the first is related to the stereotypes that people have about Africans and how academics and writers refer to Africa secondly about the images that Africans have about themselves and third the reasons for, causes and effects of these images. The interpretation, which the world at large maintains about Africa and Africans, appears cliché we have socially constructed this fixed image of the culture. This essay, definitively, opened my eyes and the way I used to think. I have always been interested in knowing how Africans think about the world and how they think about other people perceive them. How To Write About Africa by Binyavanga Wainaina is one of the most extraordinary essays I have ever read. “Sonnenuntergang in Afrika” von Petra Koob
0 kommentar(er)
